Passage to Natchez

by Cameron Judd

  The skin on the back of Clardy’s neck grew taut. Since beginning this work, it had been his secret fear that the Harpes might reveal they knew him in the past and say he was an associate of theirs. The worst part of that would be that it would be partly the truth. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing much. Just that he was looking forward to you getting here. And then he’d say, ‘Johnson! Johnson!’ and make a funny sound. Sort of a scriiiiiick! kind of noise, like fingernails on a board of slate. Can you make sense of that?”

  “No,” Clardy said. Johnson. He didn’t like that. He figured Wiley had Cale Johnson on his mind, a subject that cut too close to Clardy’s heart for comfort.

  Biegler left hurriedly, obviously glad to be away from what had become a miserable, nerve-grinding toil. Hardly had he gone before Clardy heard movement just on the other side of the Harpe cell door, and Wiley Harpe’s voice came through. “That you, Tyler?”

  Clardy lay down on the cot in the little guardroom, hands behind his head, and said nothing.

  “I said, is that you, Tyler?” A pause. “Hell yes, that’s you. I can smell it’s you! Old Clardy Tyler, back on the good side of the law! Making sure the devils don’t get out of the box!”

  “Just hush!” Clardy called back. “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “Oh, but I got plenty to say to you, Clardy Tyler! I’m in the humor to talk about old Cale Johnson.” Then he made the odd noise that Biegler had tried to imitate.

  Clardy made no reply, though he was curious about what Wiley had to say. He suspected that the issue of Cale Johnson was about to be raised in some threatening manner. Wiley Harpe was a conniving soul and had enjoyed plenty of time in that cell to realize that he might be able to make trouble for his guard. Clardy wished he had thought things through a little more completely before asking for this job.

  “There’s naught to say about Cale Johnson,” Clardy replied. “You told me to kill him, and I didn’t. I ain’t like you. I ain’t a murderer.”

  “Maybe you ain’t, maybe you are.” This came from Micajah, surprising Clardy. Micajah had kept silence most of the time, leaving the harassment to his weasel-faced brother.

  “You know I ain’t. I didn’t kill Cale. I warned him!” Clardy was irritated enough to be a little incautious. “What do you think of that, you pair of devils? You thought you had me tied around your finger, thought I’d go out and kill for you just because you wanted it. Reckon I proved you wrong.”

  “That’s right—then you run like a chickenheart!”

  “I left Tennessee because I had a chance for some good Kentucky land,” Clardy responded. It was not the first time he had used this falsehood with the Harpes. He wasn’t about to let them know he had left Beaver Creek mostly for fear of them.

  Wiley said, “Your warning didn’t do old Cale much good. He’s dead anyways.”

  Clardy sat up. “Cale ain’t dead.”

  “I hear otherwise,” Micajah replied. “I hear old Cale might have gone and gotten himself knifed. Maybe even cut open like a butchered hog and stuffed full of rocks and throwed into the Holston River.”

  “Cut wide open,” Wiley added. “Sharp knife right through flesh. Scriiiiiick!”

  “Merciful God!” Clardy said. “You’ve murdered him?”

  “We ain’t said that,” Micajah said. “Just telling stories we’ve heard, that’s all.”

  A long silence followed, during which Clardy felt sick at heart. He wondered if Cale really was dead, or if the Harpes were lying outright, trying to get to him.

  “Sad thing for old Cale, huh?” Wiley said through the door. He laughed.

  Clardy grew angry. “Shut up. Both of you. You got worry enough without wasting your time blabbering through jail doors. And you won’t have that much time. They’ll hang you.”

  “We won’t hang,” Micajah said. “You know why we won’t?”

  “Why don’t you tell me.”

  “’Cause we’re going to be set free of this place, and you’re going to be the one to do it.”

  “Never!”

  “And when you do set us free, you’ll have a fatter pocket for it,” Wiley contributed.

  Clardy laughed coldly. “You are bigger fools than I had thought. You think I’d turn two murderous whoresons loose in the world for any amount of money?”

  “Might as well be you who gains the good from it. Otherwise you might gain only the bad.”

  Micajah chuckled. “It’d be a shame for old Clardy Tyler to wind up like Cale Johnson. Shame for his belly to be laid open and stuffed with rocks. Shame for him to be eat up by fish in some river.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Harp.”

  “Just talking. Just talking. Just being friendly.”

  “Say whatever you want to say, and still I’ll not let you out of there for bribes nor threats.”

  “If you don’t, somebody else will.”

  “Nobody’s going to help you.”

  “We’ll be seeing about that,” Wiley said. “And after we’re out, Clardy Tyler, we’ll find you one dark evening, old Micajah will pull out his blade, and scriiiiiiiik!”

  They laughed together, behind their door. Clardy hated them. A moment later their foot chains rattled as they moved back farther into the room. The momentary reprieve was welcome. He pulled out his pipe, filled it, and lit it at the little fireplace on the side of the guardroom. He sat smoking, more unsettled than he wanted to admit.

  Betsy Harpe, jailed under her alias of Betsy Walker, gave out her travailing cries a day or two later. Clardy sent out for a local midwife who had been on call for the inevitable birthings since the women had been jailed. The birth was lengthy and trying, and in the end gave forth a healthy young boy.

  Born in a jail, and of such a brood as this! Clardy thought it a sad birthing, full of foreboding for the child. Innocent now—but how long could innocence linger, considering the foul kind of folk into whose world he had mischanced to be born? Clardy dreaded the future this child would face unless he could somehow be rescued from his own mother and father … whichever Harpe brother his father was. The Harpes themselves couldn’t say.

  Clardy had sugared tea brought in at Betsy’s request the next day. Biegler frowned at giving such niceties to prisoners, but grumpily added the cost of the beverage to the list of costs brought on by the birth: a pound, eight shillings, and ten pence.

  The next baby, a girl born to Susanna, came exactly a month later, rousing even greater pity in Clardy. A boy, after all, could grow up and break free from his situation far more easily than a girl. This child would probably grow up to be a common whore.

  The public, fascinated with the Harpes, evidently was thinking along similar lines. In the tavern where he ate and drank at the beginning and end of his long spells of duty, Clardy heard more and more sympathetic talk toward the Harpe women and their babies. Poor waifs, they were, trapped in the web cast by the evil men who dominated them. What was needed, Clardy heard from all sides, was for these poor women and their innocent babes to be freed from the demonic men who threatened to ruin them.

  Clardy hoped that was just what would happen, and was sure the women felt the same way. How could they actually want to keep company with the Harpe brothers? It went against reason.

  When he thought about the women, Clardy saw a deeper significance to his guard duty than mere jail-tending. He was overseeing the beginning of a process that would finally result in the removal of two evil men from the world, and in particular from the lives of three women and two babies—soon to be three babies, because Sally Rice Harpe’s pregnancy was rapidly nearing its end. Thinking about this work in that way made the drudgery and the haranguing from the Harpes a little easier to abide.

  Clardy had to smile at himself sometimes. He was certainly growing more philosophical, looking at the world from many angles he hadn’t before, and with far more seriousness. Life couldn’t be predicted, he decided. He had set off for Kentucky with the idea of becoming a criminal himself
, and now here he was, guarding a jail in the name of the law and thinking tender, moralistic thoughts about women and babies and the salvation of innocent lives—who would have thought it?

  The world was a far bigger and more surprising place than Clardy had ever anticipated it would be.

  The other guard hired by Biegler was named Beaumont Malory, and a more unpleasant and unlikable fellow Clardy had hardly ever encountered. He wasn’t sure what it was about Malory that had made him instantly distrust and dislike him. Something in the looks, the narrow face, the beadlike eyes, the set of the lip, and the eternal furrows in the forehead.

  Clardy perceived that Malory didn’t like him in turn. It was hard, however, to be sure, because Malory had little to say to either Clardy or Biegler. He was aloof to the point of being rude. Clardy sensed that even Biegler didn’t trust Malory, and wondered why he had hired him. Desperation, perhaps. Not all that many people were willing to bear responsibility for the Harpes, even for money, and even with the Harpes locked up.

  But public fascination with the criminal pair was alive and thriving, particularly since the birth of the two babies. All during daylight hours, and sometimes after dark, clumps of people would gather at the jail, talking about the “Robertses” or the Harpes, depending upon how they had heard the brothers designated. The more daring ones would go right up to the barred window and stare at the Harpes like patrons of a human zoo. The Harpes sometimes seemed offended by this, other times just as entertained as the observors. Wiley grew particularly fond of thrusting his face toward the window suddenly, snarling and snapping and drooling down his chin like a mad dog, then laughing at the startlement of his audience.

  Micajah, the more practical of the pair, tried to make the best use of these frequent public viewings. He issued a standing challenge to the crowd: Let the two best fistfighters they could recruit come forward and take him on, two against one, and he would gladly submit to whatever punishment befell him should he lose. If he should win, however, he and his brother would go free.

  No one took up the challenge, though some strutted about and claimed to be willing to do so “if only the dang court would allow it.”

  Clardy had his doubts about the sincerity of such puffy braggarts. Micajah Harpe was fearsome merely to behold. The memory of that frightening visage shoved up near his own face, talking fondly of death and murder like they were the sweet kisses of a beautiful woman, still haunted him. It was that image more than anything else that had driven him away from his home in mortal fright, and which still served to make him wonder why in the name of all that was sane he was associating himself with the Harpes now, even as a paid, official guard of the court. He thought a time or two of turning the job over to Malory completely, but his desire to please Isaac Ford, and a certain pride at having taken on such a daring task as this, and his comprehension of the public importance of his work, kept him from doing it.

  Clardy initially made efforts to be friendly with Malory at the times one relieved the other. As time went by, he gave up on it. Malory was silent, brooding, unapproachable. At length he and Clardy were down to passing duty one to the other with hardly a word of mutual acknowledgment, and the glances that Clardy found Malory firing at him were dark and ugly. Clardy mistrusted him more every day.

  One clear day when he wasn’t on jail duty, Clardy helped Isaac Ford drive horses toward Crab Orchard, where a buyer awaited. Clardy was quiet and preoccupied all the way, causing Ford to question him, but all Clardy could say was that he felt something, somewhere, was wrong. He couldn’t explain it.

  The next day he rode to Danville to take on his usual duties and found a town with a transformed atmosphere. It was disturbed; the very air crackled with tension, and he fancied that many unusual and indecipherable expressions were turned his way as he approached the jail.

  Biegler came out to meet him. “Down off that horse, Clardy. I must have words with you.”

  Clardy dismounted. “What’s wrong?”

  Biegler led him over to the side of the jail, out of earshot of anyone on the street. “The prisoners are gone.”

  “Gone …”

  “That’s what I said. They left their cell last night. Town’s in an uproar. The women are still here, but the men have fled. There’s a hole right through the far side of the wall of their cell.” Biegler paused. “There is suspicion being cast toward you.”

  Clardy grew taut as a bowstring. “Cast by who?”

  “Beaumont Malory declares that he saw you lingering around near the jail last night, off in the dark. He declares that later in the night he was struck by an unseen assailant and rendered senseless. The prisoners were freed during that time. He’s alleging that you were the one who struck him and set them free, most likely because of a past association with them. He says that Micajah Harpe himself confided to him that once you were part of a stock-thieving organization they ran down in Tennessee.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “I hope it is, boy. Because if it ain’t, you’ve made John Biegler look the biggest fool in Kentucky, hiring on guards without knowing enough about their past.”

  Clardy felt a wave of contempt. Here I am, being accused of freeing murderers, and he’s worried only about how he looks to the public. “I wasn’t in Danville last night. I was at the house of Isaac Ford, and if you don’t believe me, you can ask him or any of his family.”

  “That will be done, I assure you. It would have been done by now except that Malory told his full story only this morning.”

  “You see? He’s made it up late. Trying to keep his own hind end out of trouble. If anybody set them two free, it was Beaumont Malory himself.”

  Clardy was startled by a sudden change in Biegler’s demeanor. He shifted from nervous worry to sudden anger. “Perhaps so. It does appear the horse locks on their foot chains was unlatched by someone with a key. That would be me, you, or Malory. One of us will take the brunt for this, and I assure you, it matters not a whit to me which of you two it is. But it will not be John Biegler, no indeed!”

  “Nor will it be Clardy Tyler, sir, because I’m innocent and I can prove it.”

  “Can you, now?” As he spoke, Biegler gave Clardy a look he didn’t like. Clardy thought: This man hopes I’m guilty. “Well, we’ll have the chance to see about that. We will. It’s you or Malory who’s responsible for this, and I’m drawed, quartered, and stewed for mush if I’ll let that mantle fall on my shoulders!”

  “If I was guilty, I wouldn’t have come back here today, would I?” Clardy pointed out. “Where is Malory right now, by the way?”

  Biegler, red-faced and with a neck vein bulging and throbbing, looked around and said, “I don’t know,” and turned away.

  Clardy faced the hardest and most intense questions he had ever been hammered with in his life, and in the end prevailed. Isaac Ford was called in all the way to Danville to verify that Clardy was with him at the time the Harpes escaped. The testimony of Ford, a trusted man, was sufficient to erase any official suspicion. Added to that was the fact that Malory had mysteriously vanished. Some declared that he had been paid off by the Harpes and had vanished with his bribe in hand, others that he had gone off with the Harpes themselves, still others that the only reward he had wound up getting from the Harpes was probably a sharp knife through the throat. Whatever the case, he was gone, and no trace of what had happened to him or where he had gone was found.

  The entire affair humiliated Clardy. In the course of answering questions, he was forced to admit he had been acquainted with the Harpes back in Tennessee and had actually been on the edges of their criminal activities for a very brief time. But he had been no friend or ally. He had spurned the first criminal demand they made on him—he didn’t mention specifically what that demand was—and been threatened as a result. Clardy also deliberately failed to mention the Selma Van Zandt grave robbery and corpse mutilation, and the disappearance of Abel Van Zandt. He wasn’t proud of having evaded his duty related to those situatio
ns before, and too ashamed to lay them out for public inspection now. Clardy emerged from his interrogations cleared of suspicion but feeling his reputation had been sullied. That mattered a lot more to him now than it would have only a handful of weeks before.

  The real sullying, however, was inflicted upon the reputation of Beaumont Malory. Within two days of the Harpe escape, a general wisdom rapidly settling into firm assurance was that Malory was the true villain in the prison escape. After casting suspicions at Clardy Tyler, he had abruptly vanished.

  Malory’s disappearance left Clardy and Biegler in sole charge of the jail. Biegler was happy to let Clardy take on most of the extra work. It was easier with the Harpes no longer around to harass him, but Clardy felt unsettled. He worried secretly about his own safety, reasoning that if, as they had implied, the Harpes had returned to Knoxville to murder Cale Johnson despite all their legal dangers there, they might just as readily return here as well. A further consideration was that their women were still here, potential Harpe magnets. Clardy couldn’t quite picture the Harpes abandoning their women for good. They had probably left them behind only because they didn’t want to be slowed in their flight by two newborn babies, two women still recovering from childbirth and a third on the brink of it.

  But time would pass, Sally’s baby would come, and both the women and the children would grow stronger. And then the Harpes might return to claim what was theirs and to punish those who had stood against them.

  Such were Clardy’s secret thoughts, haunting him like his own shadow, making him hate the Harpes as much for the torment they inflicted on him in absence as for that they had inflicted when present.

  Sally Rice Harpe’s baby, a daughter, came into the world on the night of April 8, aided not by a midwife, but by the other two Harpe women. It seemed a very odd thing to Clardy to be guarding a jail occupied by three women and as many babies, ranging in age from newborn to about two months.